The Real Scandal: Americans Don’t Care About Afghanistan

Will kids who weren't yet born when the war began have to fight it ?

“Dwelling on the past is just not useful,” not at least in the opinion of Brigadier General Roger B. Turner Jr., U.S. Marine Corps. General Turner’s current duty station is Afghanistan, where he commands a modest conglomeration of Marines and sailors known as Task Force Southwest.

We might empathize with General Turner. After all, what’s the point of getting hung up on the past when you are facing a dauntingly tough job in the here-and-now? That job requires Turner to do what a run of previous U.S. military commanders have been attempting to do without notable success for almost sixteen years: to pacify Helmand Province. Were he to reflect too deeply on the disappointments of those sixteen years— the U.S. troops killed and wounded, the billions of dollars expended, all to no evident purpose—Turner just might reach the conclusion that he and his charges are engaged in a fool’s errand conceived by idiots.

We don’t want brigadier generals entertaining such heretical thoughts about basic U.S. national security policy. Their proper role is to implement, not to formulate; to comply rather than to question; to do or die not to wonder why. So General Turner’s reluctance to dwell on the course that the Afghanistan War has followed since U.S. troops entered that country in 2001 qualifies as prudent and perhaps even necessary.

Unfortunately, the officials who issue Turner his marching orders seemingly share in his reluctance to contemplate the past. The people back at the White House and in the Pentagon who should be thinking long and hard about why America’s longest war has gone so badly even as it drags on and on appear incapable or unwilling to do so. A willful amnesia prevails.

In a moment of candor, Defense Secretary James Mattis remarked not so long ago that the American war effort in Afghanistan has entered what he calls a “strategy-free time.” Mattis is on the record as vowing to fix that problem by mid-July. That deadline has now arrived. The promised strategy has not.

Reporters I talk to tell me that the Trump administration remains deeply divided on how to proceed in Afghanistan. The internal debate appears to mirror the one that played out in 2006 when the George W. Bush administration wrestled with what to do with an Iraq War that had gone badly awry.

At that time, the Pentagon convened a so-called “Council of Colonels” to study the situation and identify available alternatives. The group, which included a rising star by the name of H.R. McMaster, came up with three basic options. They were: 1) Go Big, 2) Go Long, or 3) Go Home. Ultimately, President George W. Bush opted, in effect, for a combination of 1) and 2). The result was the Iraq Surge of 2007-2008.

In the event, however, it turned out that Big—an additional increment of 30,000 troops—wasn’t big enough. And Long—the final two years of the Bush administration—wasn’t long enough. A decade later controversy about who to blame persists, but by any measure Iraq remains an epic failure of U.S. policy.

As far as present day Afghanistan is concerned, Go Big is not a plausible option. Presumably, it should be possible for the world’s greatest military to defeat the Taliban and the other primitively-armed Islamist groups active in Afghanistan. Yet political willingness to commit several tens of thousands of U.S. troops in an effort to win outright simply doesn’t exist.

Having now risen to the post of national security adviser, McMaster reportedly wants to Go Long, apparently clinging to the view that the nation-building project once grandly known as Operation Enduring Freedom can yet be redeemed. Steve Bannon, viewed in some quarters as the American Rasputin, supposedly wants to Go Home, with Mattis either uncommitted or somewhere in between.

How General Turner’s ultimate boss, the commander-in-chief, figures in all of this is difficult to say. Not least among the reasons that Afghanistan today is “strategy free” is that Trump himself has demonstrated remarkably little interest in what goes on there. Overseeing the Afghanistan War does not number among his priorities.

Worse still, members of the press share in Trump’s inclination to treat Afghanistan as an afterthought. The New York Times and the Washington Post spare no expense as they subject President Trump, the Trump administration, and the Trump family to sustained and intense scrutiny—and rightly so. Yet when it comes to setting editorial priorities, both papers choose to treat the Afghanistan War as a matter of marginal importance. Notably, neither paper maintains an active presence in Kabul.

Need further proof? Compare, if you will, the media attention lavished in just the past ten days on Beyoncé and her newborn twins with the attention allotted over the past year to what is the longest war in U.S. history. The former exceeds the latter by orders of magnitude.

Here, it seems to me, we confront the real scandal. It’s not simply that six months into the Trump administration there is no strategy to guide U.S. actions in Afghanistan, although that is bad enough. It’s that so few Americans care. They don’t know why U.S. forces are in Afghanistan, what they are doing there, how long they will remain, and whether or not they are accomplishing anything beneficial either to the United States or to the people of Afghanistan.

General Turner faces a host of challenges. One of the most daunting must be to explain to members of his command why most Americans could care less about what they are trying to do.

Andrew J. Bacevich is The American Conservative’s writer-at-large.

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COL Bacevich, you say the real scandal of our Afghanistan debacle is that so few Americans care and that we don’t know why or what we’re doing there. Do you know? If you do, please tell me. BG Turner faces maybe a bigger challenge than explaining our indifference about what his troops are trying to do; if I were one of those troops he would need to be a bit more basic – what, exactly, are we trying to do? The political will to commit several tens of thousands of American troops to the struggle, you say, doesn’t exist. Well, thank all the gods that ever were for that.

I’m a former career officer like you and I’ve too often seen, as I know you have, the “can do, follow me” attitude toward an assigned task take over to the extent that the appropriateness of the task itself gets lost in the fog. We’ve got to stop this craziness if the republic is going to survive.

I wish we could just get out of Afghanistan and forget about it. The people there don’t care who is in charge and are not interested in what we are trying to do. I’m not sure what we are trying to do there, anyway.
Our tax dollars are going there by the billions. For what? What are we trying to prove?

I can certainly empathize with Gen. Turner, his mission is the here and now.

It is the job of those not in that there and now to grapple with future, based on the present and the past. Given the size of Afghanistan, going big would have meant a full scale war.

They chose not go so. So they did not really go big. In other words a full court press or a full scale blitz. They chose to increase troop strength, but they did not change the mission, in my view.

My suggestion has been to piece meal it. Partition it, and subdue, rebuild, democratize or whatever it is they think needs to be done, one partition at a time over the course of say fifty years, maybe seventy-five. And again, that would require some brutal warfare and occupation.

As for the past, we are in a place we never should have entered. We are there because we were miffed. We could have gotten the object of our anger minus an invasion. But hotter heads prevailed, so there the sit in the there and now.

But history is replete foreign invaders occupying Afghanistan and no doubt, those generals too avoided the past past failures of others – concentrating on winning the here and the now.

Anything is possible, and I will be ever sympathetic and mindful that our men and women, (especially the men) are hard at work in their country’s service.

Ever cognizant of our past in which we made promises we to others we did not keep. In this case, the promise was probably not a good idea.

I agree that for the most part the American people don’t care about Afghanistan. In fact, they don’t care about the Middle East, except for the oil and ISIS. So the question is, why is Trump spending all his time dragging us back into all that stuff? Why in hell isn’t he building the Wall, ending immigration and work visas for foreigners, and rebuilding American infrastructure?

Personally, I’m an advocate for “Go home”. I say this because it’s unrealistic to presume we’re going to accomplish anything more while Iran and SA tirelessly pour money and guns into rebel groups around the region. Peace in the middle east isn’t going to be possible unless these state actors learn to get along with each other or one of them (Iran) conquers the other.

Well, Mr Bacevich, I believe that you have previously identified the reason for such public indifference: Most Americans have no dog in the fight, because most Americans do not serve, and have no risk of ever serving, in the military. So, expecting the American public to engage in a discussion among themselves (and it would be only among themselves, since the political class and the jabbering class don’t listen to the public) would be naive.

The “real scandal” is not the indifference of the public. The “real scandal” is that the military leadership knows to a moral certainty that Afghanistan can never be “won” in any enduring sense, yet they keep quiet about it because to say this would be a career-killer.

A lot of young Afghans have taken up Angela Merkel on her offer to house them and feed them in Germany, courtesy of the German tax-payer. This may solve the Afghan problem that Mr. Bacevich is worried about. Of course Afghanistan will be recreated in Germany, but that is apparently something we need to all look forward to.

Pray tell, Mr. Bacevich, the suspense is killing me – its been sixteen years after all – why is the United States in Afghanistan? And how different would the policy emanating from the White House be if your candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, – the Witch of Wall St., the Destroyer of Libya, the provocateur of Russia – was gracing its hallowed halls?

No president wants to be identified with losing a war (even if “winning” it has never been defined). That is why the Afghan War is on its 3rd US president; none of them wanted to continue this conflict, but none has had the vision or the political resolve to end it.

The American people need to find a way to demand an end to this nonsensical policy before any more of our people are killed in that God-forsaken place.

I disagree. I think most Americans are against this pointless, unwinnable war. But the decision to stay or leave is not in the hands of most Americans. It is in the hands of the very people who profit from continuing this conflict.

Politicians, the military and defense contractors are making huge bank off of the lives of American soldiers. President Trump would be lauded for getting us out of Afghanistan by everyone except the power players who benefit from it. Look at Syria. Who is angry about him cutting our involvement there? Only the Deep State. Everyone else knew a long time ago that we had no dog in that fight.

Worse, in many cases they don’t know THAT US forces are in Afghanistan.

Last year I was teaching the American Revolution to some college students, and to illustrate the paradoxical difficulties faced by a super-power in a contest with a revolutionary-nationalist movement, I said something about how we are currently facing some of the same difficulties Britain had in the 1770s in our struggle with the Taliban.

One of the advantages of face-to-face teaching is that, like stand-up comedy, you know right away when it’s not working. I saw immediately that this analogy wasn’t having the desired effect of making the foreign familiar. So I probed.

“Can anyone tell me who the Taliban are?” Nothing. “Can anyone tell me where i would need to go if I wanted to see dome Taliban?” A young woman wrinkled her nose and raised her hand slowly and tentatively: “The Middle East?”

I’m still trying to figure out what-all that means. One possible lesson: When we hear that the administration is thinking of outsourcing the war to private security companies, and is investigating whether Afghanistan’s mineral wealth would justify such a commitment from a cost-benefit perspective, it seems plain we’re well primed to go down that road with little or no citizen-based resistance, if that should be the administration’s choice.

Many Americans believe the real reason we are in the Middle East is oil. This is a smoke screen. Saddam would have given us all the oil we needed at a discount to stop us invading and for us to lift the sanctions. All knew he had no weapons of mass destruction and there was no link to 9/11. So, what are we doing there? Just ask an honest neocon? If such a neocon exist.

As a draftee infantryman in Vietnam in 1968, I had no idea what I was there for, other than the standard refrain, to save the South from communism. If we are to fight these geopolitical wars, we need the president to make the case to the public. Fireside chats, rallies, whatever. People need to be educated on the subject so they can make that very important decision, whether or not they want to endanger their lives or those of their children in a fight in a faraway nation. Platitudes and flag waving won’t do it anymore.

“Any plan for Afganistan other than “go home” has no possibility of success. We are only there because we refuse to accept the fact of an obvious defeat.”

I remain totally wedded to the notion that the entire effort was unnecessary to the task of getting Osama Ben Laden.

But after sixteen years, the US organizations have created a relational dynamic that is beyond strategic. It’s deeply involved in the lives of millions. If you are an advocate of get out now. I would be curious to know your response to the millions whom the US has enlisted in their effort. If you are prepared to say, “What happens to them is none of our concern.” I would like to hear you say it.

In all of our endeavors the one ethic for which there will be long term practical and existential consequences for is setting up others to fate that we promulgated. Nothing plagues me more than our consequence for setting places a chaos for no cause and then abandoning the mess as if,

“General Turner faces a host of challenges. One of the most daunting must be to explain to members of his command why most Americans could care less about what they are trying to do.”

Most Americans could care less about what the US Military is trying to do in Afghanistan because most Americans have been given a good reason why we are still in Afghanistan. Is it to prevent Islamist fundamentalists from establishing a safe haven to rebuild an al Qaeda like organization that would attack America again? There are already plenty of places where they could/are active: Pakistan, Nigeria, Libya, Mali, Yemen, Somalia, ,Germany, France, Belgium, UK, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Camaroon…and on and on. The US doesn’t have thousands of troops trying build their nation for them.

What makes Afghanistan so different from all those places? No one has given the American people the answer to that question. That is the “Real Scandal” to put it in your words. Do you know the answer?

Going Long is a form of Going Big in terms of sustainable weapons manufacturer income streams? Go Home? But the country has taken just about all it can in terms of national security state police state infrastructure. No, profits for an important domestic manufacturing sector, grown outsized in influence as peacetime goods making moved offshore, requires creating the appetite for those products, that is, continuous warfare with no other purpose at all. War is, because war is what American business does. Where would you possibly find employment for returning troops, and what would you replace those corporate profits with?

Prof. Bacevich re: the caption: No one will “have to” fight the war in Afg. … no one has “had to” fight in an American war since 1973. As to our purpose there? Occam’s Razor says, keeping an armed presence between two unstable Islamic nations with formidable militaries, aka Iran and Pakistan. Any other reason falls flat.

At least she’s not an idiot. She could comprehend a strategy conference with military leaders, and absorb information that requires more than 30 seconds of mental engagement. And she wouldn’t be making the US a laughingstock.

Why is the US in Afghanistan? Frankly, as has been noted, no one will stand up and kill his career speaking against it. And the military industrial complex, as cliche as it is, would like to keep sucking at that government fountain of money.

“Conservatives” love to moan about welfare and Medicaid and government waste; if they were true conservatives, they’d be going nuts about military spending.

I’ve come to the conclusion that only two circumstances can generate significant antiwar sentiment on the part of the general public:

A. There is a draft and a significant number of young men (and in our progressive age, women) face the prospect of a bloody death on a foreign battle field.

B. There are significant causalities numbering well into the thousands.

Both factors were present during Vietnam, creating the conditions for a massive antiwar movement. Only one was present during the height of Iraq 2.0, so the anti-war movement during that era never reached the heights that it did during Vietnam. Neither factor is present today, so there is not much of an anti-war movement to speak of. Whatever else they may say, most Americans just don’t care very much about dead Afghans and Middle Easterners in general. See no evil. Hear no evil.

I was amazed to see your headline, because a couple of hours earlier I had read the NYT article, “Trump Finds Reason for the U.S. to Remain in Afghanistan: Minerals,” dated today also, where it seems much discussion about Afghanistan is taking place even as we speak. As I had just browsed an article in the Guardian on his sister, one name that really jumped out was that of Erik Prince, who is being conferred with on the matter.

I thought Trump might actually follow thru on starting to dismantle the empire and start plowing the resources into this country for things like healthcare/infrastructure etc., (like a 10% chance he might actually do it), but he knew all along that bombing things is when you become presidential.

Things were relatively stable in Afghanistan
under the warlords…people suitably brutal to
a country with much brutality. Arming a suitable contingent of warlords might be a way to stop the Taliban’s advance. While not adhering to Western liberal standards,this would almost certainly be preferable to Taliban control.

I recently have noticed the US Army running a lot of ads on TV offering an extra $40,000 bonus to any “highly qualified” suckers, I mean heroes, willing to join up and be cannon fodder for the American Empire. Is the Army having problems finding enough suckers, I mean heroes?

““Conservatives” love to moan about welfare and Medicaid and government waste; if they were true conservatives, they’d be going nuts about military spending.”

Some of us are.

“At least she’s not an idiot. She could comprehend a strategy conference with military leaders, and absorb information that requires more than 30 seconds of mental engagement. “

Evidence? From the little we know she seems to have been utterly incompetent: Libya, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Honduras, Sudan, the failed “reset with Russia”, the non-existent “pivot to Asia”, the “smart power” BS, etc. Part laughably bad judgment, part diplomacy-by-soundbite, and all of it little different from what we’ve come to expect of Trump, except that Trump hasn’t yet managed to inflict Clinton-level damage yet.

“And she wouldn’t be making the US a laughingstock. “

But she already did. Both as “First Lady” (ha ha) and then as “Secretary of State” (ha ha).

Well, as a sort of ‘outsider’, with family connections in the region of Afghanistan going back over a century; I think the reasons ‘we’ are in Afghanistan have next to nothing to do with Afghanistan itself but close to everything about the countries around it. Afghanistan is a ‘fortress’ with colossal strategic potential if one is planning for a future war with Iran, Russia or China. Afghanistan is sitting virtually across the route of the New Silk Road the Chinese are building to consolidate and expand their control of the Eurasian land mass, which is the future economic powerhouse of this century. The US is determined to push its’ way into Eurasia, with or without the ‘permission’ of the Russians and the Chinese, and in this perspective, Afghanistan is the perfect base for such an intervention. What the long-suffering Amercian people might think about such a reason for staying in Afghanistan, is irrelevant; because no one is going to tell them or ask them.

The way I see it (11-B) we are there to kill the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Not to mine minerals or build girls’ schools.
The Taliban are Al Qaeda’s best allies and AQ did 9/11 and would love to do another, as Hamza BL reminds us.
Don’t negotiate with them. Kill them. Follow them into Pakistan if you have to.

Americans in Afghanistan only helping the Taliban to motivated the locals to murder the Americans and keep getting financial help to pretend that they are collaborating with Americans,and only poor people pays the price.

The main problem with inhabitants of Yankland is that they think the part of a continent between the 49th paralelle and the Rio Grande is actually the whole world and they have no idea what goes on outside that rogue nation.